


Snowblind

by somegunemojis



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Land of Snow mission, On the Run, Trans Hatake Kakashi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:56:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26289115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somegunemojis/pseuds/somegunemojis
Summary: The mountains might change you-- for better, or for worse.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	Snowblind

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for child endangerment and uh suicidal idealization and tendencies

Hatake Kakashi is fifteen years old when he’s put on a solo assignment to the Land of Snow. This is his ninth consecutive mission in a row, he has not spent more than a single night in the village for almost six months, he has not spoken to his friends, he has not visited their graves. He’s just shy of five and a half feet tall, just shy of his sixteenth birthday, and he is trying to die.

The Sandaime hands him a slim file with a grim set to his jaw, and he doesn’t think he imagines the faint shiver to the tip of the old man’s fingers, the weary slump of his shoulders, the defeated look in his eyes. Gai had caught him on the way here, took his elbow in hand boldly, in a way few dare to even now, and whispered that Sarutobi Asuma had taken off, that the fight this time had been legendary. Kakashi fears, for a moment, that he’s being sent to retrieve him-- or worse. He looks down at the mission scroll: A-rank, solo. 

His heart crawls up into his throat. Sarutobi Hiruzen sits unmoving, and Kakashi breaks the seal, unrolls it, and feels the knot of tension in his chest unfurl slightly. He’s being sent to … _retrieve a princess,_ as her father is worried about the political tension in his nation. He almost laughs aloud, thinking to himself: _you're sending me to retrieve a six year old girl? Alone?_ the idea is ridiculous – his social skills are sorely lacking, and The Hound’s are even worse. His lone eye flicks to the third Hokage’s face, settling on the grave (worried?) expression there. 

He doesn’t understand, but it's not his job to understand. 

He pulls the mask down, **Kakashi** overshadowed by the pelt of **The Hound** and rasps, ‘mission accepted.’ He is fifteen years old, he has no one to say goodbye to, and he is trying to die. He packs his bag, and leaves that night.

The Land of Snow, as the name may suggest, is a miserable and frigid place. The journey there is treacherous. Avoiding detection in the Land of Fire, his home, is the easiest part – the weather is hot, sure, but the summer is ending. He has the resources and speed to make it to the border of the Land of Iron in less than a day, a whole seventy miles. The weather cools, the trees and cover thin, and he has to be careful to avoid detection passing through a nation that can almost be classified as an ally. Finding a ship large enough to stow away on at this time of year proves a challenge. The waters around the Land of Snow are already freezing and treacherous, full of hidden rock and wrathful storms. 

He spends a week in the cargo bay of a merchant vessel that smells heavily of rotting vegetables, saving his rations and surviving off rats and scraps he can steal from the galley, unwilling to leave a trace of himself in the form of missing wares and goods. A storm floods the hold with frigid sea water one night, particularly vicious. The whole time it rages on around him he can taste the lightning in the air, his own chakra singing in response, and he counts himself lucky there are no shinobi on board-- they probably would have sensed him, or looked up, and caught him clinging to the rafters to avoid the cold slush. The Captain only curses their luck, and they continue north. 

Crawling out of the ship at half past two in the morning is … something else. He’s been cold before, seen snow, but the biting wind this far north whips through the fabric of his clothes, eats away at the heat inside him, curls in his lungs and stings at his open eye. Kakashi’s father told him once that the Hatake Clan came from the mountains in the north – the shepherds in the Land of Frost, the swordsmen of the Land of Iron. That icy heritage in his blood does little for him now, sea-damp as he is and huddling into his cloak, half starved from eating nothing but raw rat and gruel for a week. 

The Hound gathers his chakra, breathes fire into his lungs to fight the cold, and moves on to find shelter for the night. 

-

In the light of day, the Land of Snow is a nation in disarray. People whisper in the streets, whisper at and about each other, shy away from anyone in a uniform. He’s an outsider in a white mask, yes, but ninja aren’t common in this area, and it’s almost easy to put on a henge and wander about, gathering information. They whisper things like _coup d'etat_ , like _consolidation of power_ , like _Royal Family_ and _the poor princess, she's not even seen a decade._

The Hound wonders why the people are so afraid, wonders if it’s because they’re powerless. Hatake Kakashi wonders whether the Land of Fire, and all the ninja of the Hidden Leaf would even bother to fight. He wonders which side he would choose.

Recon done, he fades into the shadows, and makes for the castle of the royal family. 

\- 

The smoke can be seen from miles away, and the fire from the palace lights up the horizon in gold, in orange, in red. Supporting himself on top of the deep snow and keeping himself warm with his chakra both leaves him winded, and he pushes himself, afraid that maybe he is too late. There are bodies scattered in the snow – the first one is nearly six miles out, a lady draped in fine silks, her feet bare, a swathe of black hair haloed out around her head. He stops to check on her despite the stillness of the air and the scent of blood, of death. She’s bleeding from the mouth, her nose, and her face is already covered in hoarfrost, rapidly cooling in the cold. The next four, five bodies he checks are all the same, some with visible injuries and some without, and the next ten, and so on until he is only checking the smaller, female forms. The Hound is here for a child princess, not to shut the eyes of every frozen corpse he comes across. 

He finds her in snow up to his knees, tear stained, breathing raggedly, covered in blood that doesn’t belong to her. She hits him in the face, in the chest, screams when he picks her up, and he realizes he never learned her name. He doesn’t know what to call her, how to calm her down, so he puts her to sleep with the sharingan swirling in his skull and takes off at a dead run, unwilling to face a battle with a child in his arms. 

They meet a man who gives him a sled and a team of dogs. A man who bundles up the princess in wool blankets, dries her tears, calls her _Princess_ and _Koyuki-chan_ , a man who looks like a ferret, who gives The Hound’s damp cold weather gear a worried glance. He takes off, gets a little ways into the forest before summoning Pakkun, and tucks him in next to the still-sleeping girl and tells him to keep her warm, gets the least impressed look he’s ever seen come from the old dog, and then they’re off again. 

Some asshole nearly cuts him in half and panics all of the dogs on the sled, and so he has to reassess. 

\- 

It takes him nearly three days to make it to the coast, burdened as he is. He wakes the princess to feed her, and she does not scream, only watches him warily, and, when she seems to remember something, begins to cry. After that, she is listless but obedient, and he does not put her back to sleep.

He doesn’t call her Koyuki-chan, or offer her platitudes. He’s not sure they’re going to survive the rest of the journey, not with the way the gash on his side doesn’t seem to be closing, or his dangerously low chakra reserves, the way the cold is creeping in and turning the bed of his nails blue. Pakkun has been keeping the girl warm, but he’s been shooting his human irritated, concerned glances, and that’s never a good sign. 

By some miracle, or perhaps divine luck (his nose and an age-old instinct buried in the back of his skull), he makes it to a tiny, frozen village along the coast, populated by a dozen or so squat fishermen and their families. One of the women spot him through the heavy snowfall, takes in the dog mask and the blood trail and the black haired bundle in his arms, and ushers him inside her home, chattering nervously the whole time. The warmth hits him like a train, and he stumbles into her table, legs suddenly coltish in the abrupt temperature change. He doesn’t drop his charge, even when the woman nearly screams with fright at his sudden movement. They stand, staring at each other across the table, silently, and The Hound briefly wonders if he looks more or less surreal here than he did emerging the swirling snow, white haired, white cloaked, white masked like a long-forgotten demon. 

A man walks in and breaks the spell, taking a look at the shivering pair across from the table and sighing heavily. The Hound sets his bundle in a chair, palms a kunai, and pulls the wool blanket from her face. The pair of villagers – husband and wife? siblings? – look between each other, unreadable, and back to him and his charge. The silence stretches, and his shoulders pull tighter, but.

The woman sighs, murmurs, "I'll heat the water for a bath."

-

The Hound had refused the offer to soak, but accepted a watery stew, eating like a man (a teenager, just a teenager) half-starved, his back half-turned to the couple while he chokes down the meager sustenance. The man tells him to slow down but he still eats himself sick, returning from the cold a few minutes later sheepishly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The man gives him a booming laugh, doesn’t clap him on the shoulder, and slides another bowl in front of him. This one, he savors. 

The woman bundles the princess into more sensible, if a little worn-looking wool clothes and some warmer boots. She eats her own stew mechanically, table manners impeccable despite the fact that he knows she must be hungry. They offer their floor to them for the night, and, warily, The Hound accepts. He settles the girl against the warm stones of the hearth, sits on a stool and peels off his cloak, his damaged armor, settles them in front of the crackling fire to dry in the night, and bandages himself up as best as he's able. The man smokes a pipe and watches the storm outside, and when The Hound – still white-dog-masked – wraps a blanket around his own shoulders, he finally speaks. 

"Our daughter died last winter," he mutters, voice hoarse. "And our son, the winter before that. They were of your ages."

Pale fingers curl tighter in the rough fur he’s pulled around his shoulders, and The Hound knows it’s that of a wolf-- the scent of her life and death lingers even years later. He doesn’t say he’s sorry for their loss, and he doesn't ask how their children met their untimely ends, but he does dip his head. So far, he has not once spoken since setting out on this mission nearly two weeks ago, and his voice cracks and creaks when he finally manages it.

"There was a woman," he says. "She ran six miles before she collapsed, barefoot. She died, but she wasn't injured."

The man understands: he wants to know why. He sighs, runs a hand down his scraggly beard. "The cold here can freeze your lungs, makes 'em burst. You drown in blood," he says, "not a good way to go-- you're lucky it didn't happen to you, if you've traveled far or fast." 

"There's no such thing as luck-- and if there was, it doesn't live out here," The Hound replies, thinking of the warmth he could form, could breathe into his own lungs. 

A humorless chuckle, a dry, "Suppose it doesn't, at that," and then the man shuffles off to his bed. 

-

In the morning, the man offers to take him across the straits into Earth country, quietly bundles them into the flat bottom of his fishing vessel and sails off into the fog. The trip takes a week, and the weather holds, but The Hound thinks they must be miserable company – a girl in a waking coma, and a strange masked figure that rarely speaks. He helps sail, at least, figuring he may as well make himself useful on the voyage. 

The man, who he has never learned the name of, refuses payment once they land on warmer shores. "I won't take any of your money for this, boy," he says, and "That's the princess, isn't it?" The Hound thinks about the wife the man left behind, and he thinks about how people talk. He thinks about killing this man, about taking his ship and sailing further west to throw off any tail he might have, thinks he learned enough on the voyage here to survive it. 

Instead he dips his head, hefts the girl into his arms, and disappears into the night. The money he leaves under the man’s pack must be an accident. 

\- 

It’s a straight shot into Fang country, through Claw, and the air warms enough that they need to steal her some cooler clothes, and he picks up a lighter cloak for himself. They get into rain, and she starts to feel heavy again in his arms, his body beginning to starve. The damp sucks at his energy, leaves the both of them with a wracking cough that they can’t seem to shake, even once they make it into the Land of Fire and all of her tall, ancient trees. 

He thinks his birthday passed in the past month, that he’s probably sixteen now, as they pass the gates of Tanzaku Gai, where he’s supposed to meet her new keepers. He keeps to the roofs, and if anyone at all notices the Konoha ANBU lurking in the shadows of the buildings, around these parts they know better than to look at him directly. The Hound leaves a message in the designated dead drop.

He finds them a safehouse, drops the princess into a chair and forces some food into her, sets wards and traps at all the entrances and then sleeps for the next three days. She’s curled on the ground next to him when he wakes, hand fisted in his cloak, her eyes hard. He realizes with no small amount of confusion that she had shaken him awake.

"You stopped breathing," she says, the first words she’s uttered since she was cursing at him and screaming on the mountainside. 

"Sorry," he replies, and stands on shaking legs. 

-

They have one more day.

The Hound eats, and she tells him she feels Hunted, asks him if she is going to die. He doesn’t know what to say, so he tells her this: "Wolves don't kill the swift deer, they kill the weak ones."

She clutches at the chain around her neck, her little face turning grim. Yeah, he doesn’t quite understand Kakashi’s grandmother’s wisdom either.

-

He adjusts his mask, and they make their way to the agreed upon meeting place at the agreed upon time. The weasel-man is there, nervously fidgeting with his glasses, and he begins weeping when he sees the princess, throwing himself at her feet. She looks at The Hound, and The Hound looks down at her, pats her on the head, and disappears. 

-

It takes him a whole day to limp back to the village. He reports in, mind hazy, steals a bottle of shochu on the way back to his apartment. The painted wooden mask comes off, the cloak, the armor. He peels off his gloves, his cloth mask, his shirt and his pants. The tile under his feet in the bathroom is unpleasantly cold on his tired feet. He turns the shower on its hottest setting and sits under the spray, thinking about what it would be like to sprint desperately in your bare feet until your lungs burst inside your body from the cold. He thinks about the first woman’s face, frosted a little, wonders if anyone cleaned up the bodies or they had simply been left for the scavengers. 

The gathering steam irritates his cough. Kakashi gets out of the shower, hacking into his fist, and curls up in the sheets of his bed without turning the light on. The shochu sits untouched on his nightstand. 

Hatake Kakashi is sixteen years old when he completes a solo assignment to the Land of Snow. This was his ninth consecutive mission in a row, he has not spent more than a single night in the village for over seven months now, he has not spoken to his friends, has not visited their graves. He’s five feet and seven inches tall when he returns, half-starved and struggling to remember how to speak, and he is still trying to die.


End file.
